Coffee and Chips
by Born-Of-Elven-Blood
Summary: Clara is not Rose. The Doctor knows this. But from time to time he seems to forget. [Twelve/Clara; shades of Doctor/Rose]
1. Prologue - The Ones He Chose

**Disclaimer:** I don't own the plot or characters of Doctor Who, I just occasionally sneak them out the back and drive them to the bar to meet up with the muse. All thing considered, its for the best; I would only mistreat them.

 **A/n:** Strange things happen when you leave me alone in the dark at 3am after a Doctor Who binge. This is merely one of them. Pretty much wrote this whole story in one sitting, with very little editing to my stream-of-consciousness, so while I think it's perfectly coherent, let's just say I bet Faulkner felt the same way about _As I Lay Dying_. In case it is not obvious, this fic is set during Series 8, italicized quotes are flashbacks to previous seasons. Thank you in advance for putting up with my allegedly methodical madness!

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 **Prologue: The Ones He Chose**

* * *

 **1.**

Clara is not Rose.

Just as Nine is not Ten, and Eleven is not Twelve.

Just as coffee is not chips, but he'll get to that in a minute.

The point is, they are unique, individual, different.

And yet - and yet! - even so, just think! – well, goes without saying, he can't help that, he's tried and it doesn't work - Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve! All different, yet just the same, they are that. That being _the same_. (Semantics, nothing but trouble, no one ever bothers to keep up.)

He wants to say it makes the whole analogy false, but much to his fascinated dismay, it doesn't.

For so, he is forced to concede, are Clara and Rose.

The same, that is.

'Clara is Rose?' you inquire somewhat skeptically. And the Doctor gives you one of _those_ looks, just to let you know, for your own good, that you should stuff a sock in it now and start paying attention.

Clara is not Rose, not remotely the same, and yet in spite of that very clear and simple fact, it remains that they are uniquely alike, for they share a key commonality, and it is, perhaps, he thinks, where this whole fiasco started – at the beginning.

Well, no, not really, and really, it started with coffee and chips, but really, no _really_ , if you'll jut hang on a tick, he'll _get_ to that in a _minute_.

Because even before that, they had something essential in common.

" _I never know why. I only know who."_

They are the ones he chose.

* * *

 **2.**

Regeneration is the greatest vulnerability the Doctor ever knows. Disoriented and defenseless as a newborn, malleable as wet clay, lost in a new body, a new brain, a new world, mumbling like a mad man, utterly alone, a head full of memories that belonged to other men, a stranger even to himself, totally at the mercy of a merciless cosmos.

It never becomes less harrowing. It never becomes easier to trust.

That is why he chooses so carefully.

That is why he chose Rose.

That is why he chose Clara.

* * *

 **3.**

Sometimes he can't choose. Sometimes causality, coincidence, fate (if you really must), takes the matter totally out of his hands. Sometimes there are unwanted guests, and sometimes the ones he would choose to stay have gone beyond reaching. More often than not, he finds his privacy either violated or enforced beyond the scope of his influence.

Only twice has he been afforded the luxury of self-determination in this most intimate of affairs.

Only twice has he _chosen._

Others friends are valued, enjoyed, missed, but these – the ones he chooses – these are the _trusted_ , when no one else, no matter how beloved, is ever, _ever_ that.

* * *

 **4.**

They matter the most, the ones he chooses. It isn't favoritism, it's only fact.

" _I never know why. I only know who."_

They bear witness, and the burden of memory. When all the dross and darkness and damage are shed, they are the fragile remnant around which he would build the future, no matter Who he becomes next. They stand as mirrors of his fear and wonder, and shine like madonnas through new-made eyes, the first faces he sees when he burst through the crumbling shell of his old world, into the harsh and alien light of a new one.

They are the bridge between who he was and who he will be – the lifeboat of his virtue. The very best of him.

They are the salvation that stands waiting for him one step over the edge of oblivion.

That is exactly how important they are, the ones he chooses.

* * *

 **5.**

Clara is not Rose.

Same as coffee is not chips.

But in this, though different, they are the same. And maybe, when he says it, that's why he says it.

Because they are the ones he chose.

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 **Pause to reflect - take a moment to question the author's life choices - leave a review - okay, now keep reading!**


	2. Coffee and Chips

**Disclaimer: Not mine, not for profit, pop goes the weasel!**

 **A/n:** Reminder, italics are for flashbacks, and Trix are for kids. Silly rabbit.

* * *

 **Coffee and Chips**

* * *

 **1**

" _Do you smell chips?"_

He doesn't mean to say it, but it is all so sudden.

Clara is not Rose. He knows that. Of course he knows that. He is the Doctor, he knows quite a lot of things! But above all, right here and now, he knows this: Clara is not Rose. He is very careful to know it, and makes sure to remember to know it, knowing it several times with each tick of the clock when necessary.

But once in a while, despite his best effort, sometimes he seems to forget.

So he doesn't mean to say it. He really doesn't. He has already said what he ought, what he must – " _Clara I'm not your boyfriend"_ _–_ and chips don't factor into that anywhere, do they?

But suddenly, so suddenly, Clara transforms. One moment so hearts-breakingly mistrustful, she suddenly sees him – _sees_ him – breaks into a radiant smile and throws her slender arms around his neck like bands of silk, delicate and unbreakable.

And she is not Rose. And he knows it, of course he knows it.

But he's still new, and maybe he can't quite keep up.

* * *

 **2.**

 _Hugging_ _._ How many times has she done this? How often has he? Not even his remarkable memory can summon up a count of the times he has embraced her, held her tight and close against his body, kissed the skin of her face, her hands, her mouth just the once...

But that was a different body, different bones and sinews wrapped in different skin threaded with different nerve endings, which now explode like landmines at the warm, gentle pressure of her nearness. He is acutely, devastatingly aware of each point at which her body contacts his. It overwhelms, burns, terrifies momentarily in its intensity, and the intensity with which he suddenly longs to let her burn him.

And he is baffled to catch the phantom aroma of frying chips wafting in the air, just the same as that day so very long ago, when another girl that he had loved first agreed to sail the stars at his side.

* * *

 **3.**

He hasn't said it yet. He doesn't mean to, but he will. He knows it. Premonition is just remembering in the wrong direction. He hasn't said that to her yet either. Too much time travel. It happens.

A barely coherent verbal exchange about geography and the democratic process takes place, which secures his release from the burning silken embrace. He cannot quite believe the conflicted tangle of relief and regret that the change in their relative positions engenders. It is nearly as intense as the hug itself.

They have always touched, have come into contact in a thousand insignificant and affectionate ways since the inception of their acquaintance. Now, what has been a casual symphony of sensations, so seemingly natural as to fade and vanish into the fabric of their _tête_ -à- _tête_ _,_ has, between one face and the next, been rendered somehow sacred.

Touch seems to sanctify with distance.

 _"_ _Can I…" Rose entreated, reaching out a hand towards him through the sting of salted sea air that he cannot feel._

A rite too holy to profane with casual observance.

 _"…_ _just an image… no touch."_

It is different, of course. A different kind of distance. With Rose, it was an ending. This is a beginning. He could not touch Rose then, no matter how much he may have longed to. He _will not_ touch Clara now, no matter… yes, it is different.

* * *

 _ **4.**_

Clara looks up at him through the ever-expanding gulf of awkward silence that has sprung up to buzz in the patch of air between them, watching with those wide, innocently knowing eyes. His tongue ties itself in a prize-winning knot as he searches for something to say.

"Do you want to go get some coffee… or…"

 _"_ _I want chips."_

And he doesn't mean to say it. But he does anyway, because maybe he was always going to.

"… chips… "

Clara is not Rose. He knows that, of course, of course…

"… or chips _and_ coffee…"

…but the thing is, it seems, yes, the terrible thing is, that he is, once again, and always, still himself.

 _Humans… I never learn…_

He wonders, feeling like a fool, how much the weight of what he just asked shows on his brand new face.

* * *

 **5.**

"Coffee would be great," Clara says. If she understands the declaration he's just delivered, she generously doesn't let on. There is relief in the way her arms relax and swing down at her sides as she sways towards him minutely before spinning away, artlessly enticing him to give chase. "You're buying."

Despite the fear, which, rather than dissipating as he'd hoped, has merely changed forms, he feels as though he could laugh out loud. Might have done it, too, if her words hadn't hit him like a punch to the gut.

" _Chips it is, and you can pay."_

He falls in, pacing uncertainly beside her.

"I haven't got any money."

Twelve hundred years later, and still the same tightwad. It is reassuring in some ways. In others, it is bloody terrifying.

 _"_ _What sort of date are you?" Rose laughs from the other end of eternity._

"Alright," Clara concedes magnanimously, and she truly, undeniably, inescapably is not Rose, even though these feelings are so distressingly the same. "You're fetching."

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 **More to come, whether you like it or not! Muwahahahaha! Remember, every time you forget to review, god kills a kitten... or was that something else... well, just to be on the safe side, you know what to do! Please, think of the kittens.**


	3. Just Like a Woman

**Disclaimer: Second verse same as the first.**

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 **Just Like a Woman**

* * *

 **1.**

He has done it before. Closed a door on someone. It's usually physical, often metaphorical, and frequently tragic. This, however, is only the second time he has intentionally closed a door and trapped a woman, a friend, behind it with a monster.

" _The vault's being sealed off, Rose. I'm the one doing it."_

"Sorry, too slow," he murmurs.

Clara's eyes are wide with uncertainty and fear, big enough to have developed their own local gravity, it seems; the only acceptable explanation for why he lingers here, unable to break their gaze.

" _Sorry, I was a bit slow," Rose murmured, her voice trembling._

"There's no point in them catching us both."

Rational. True. It sounds like the worst and most callous of excuses to his own ears, but they're fresh on, so he can't be sure.

" _I can't wait and I can't help you."_

"No! Doctor!" Clara whispers, her voice trembling.

Clara is not Rose. But walking away now feels just like pressing that button then.

" _I killed her once. I can't do it again."_

* * *

 **2**.

Clara is not Rose, even though they peer into the jaws of death with the same defiance on their lips.

"Go on then."

" _Go on then."_

"Do it."

" _Kill me."_

* * *

 **3.**

"I don't know where the Doctor is…"

Rose had offered absolution.

" _It wasn't your fault. Remember that, okay? And do you know what...?"_

But Clara is not Rose.

"…but I know where he will be. Where he will always be…"

Because Clara does not offer forgiveness.

"... _I wouldn't have missed it for the world."_

Clara offers no excuse, no comfort, no pardon.

"…if the Doctor is still the Doctor…"

Instead, Clara delivers faith. And expects miracles.

"…he will have my back."

Tiny hand vibrating with terror, she reaches behind, but she does not look back; just like a woman, all expectation and demands. He lingers, marveling, letting her trust strain to the edge of its breaking and continue to hold, and in that moment he knows it all over again – Clara is not Rose - and wonders what it all means.

As he claps his hand over hers and pulls her to him, he wonders what he has gotten himself into.

"Five foot one and crying! You never stood a chance!"

There'll be no living with her now.

* * *

 **4**.

"A good Dalek?"

"There's no such thing."

The Doctor has a blind spot when it comes to Daleks. It is, he feels, a perfectly rational, healthy and justifiable stance, and the only one compatible with common sense and conducive with sanity – namely, that they are the sum total epitome of all that is wrong and evil this or any universe, and should be instantly and thoroughly destroyed on sight.

It is a philosophy that has served him rather well through the years. Only a handful of times has it led him astray. His great good fortune is that at those times, he has nearly always had at his side someone with wider eyes and purer spirit.

"That's a bit inflexible. Not like you. I'd almost say prejudiced." Clara's lips close pointedly over the hole in the lid if the styrofoam cup, her coffee serving to underscore the observation in ways she can't possibly begin to grasp.

"Do I pay you?" he sighs, defeated. "I should give you a raise."

"You're not my boss," Clara smiles coquettishly, coffee cup clutched close in her hand, permeating the air with a rich, alluring aroma, beckoning like a vaporous finger crooked at him on the breeze; in that moment, not even the nostalgically mouthwatering odor of frying chips could overpower it. "You're one of my hobbies."

* * *

 _ **5.**_

The first time Rose met a Dalek, she got inside it and made it good against its will. Eyes full open and full of censure she had stood between his gun and his prey, and had shamed him into submission. Because the fear reflected in her eyes was of him.

 _"_ _The Dalek is changing! What about you Doctor? What the hell are you changing into?"_

But Clara is not Rose. Rusty was already good when he and Clara arrived, and they have worked hard together to make it evil again.

Even so, when Clara looks at him, wide eyes full of censure, she summons in him that same shame, and it comes to her call on the tide of a kind of instinct, without any rational conscious cause. Confused, he finds himself as beset as any mortal male in the history of the sexes by the baffling and irrepressible force of incomprehensible female disapproval.

He expresses this ageless quandary with an altogether eloquent, "What's that look for?"

So she slaps him. Tiny little thing, she's hardly a prize fighter, so his pride stings more than his face. Now would be the time to assert his masculine dominance and correct her, but his jaw is hanging open idiotically in wounded disbelief and it goes quite a ways towards spoiling the effect.

"Daleks are evil!" he protests, all righteous explanations and wounded dignity, and still manages to feel distinctly as though he's being pulled by the ear up to the front of the class and crowned with a dunce cap. "Irreversibly so! That's what we just learned!"

"No, Doctor, that is not what we just learned!"

It's all thumbs and tied tongue and mounting sense of impotence before the solidly intractable female surety of a woman who knows, against all sound argument and evidence to the contrary, that he has got it wrong, and she has got it right.

Clara is not Rose, but oh, has he ever been here before.

 _"_ _Get out of the way, Rose! I've got to do this! I've got to end it!"_

"Is that really what we've learned?"

 _"_ _It couldn't kill me! It's changing!"_

"Think about it!"

 _"_ _I won't let you do this!"_

He can't take it when they double team him like this. He's just no match.

No choice left to him, he stops. He quiets the screams and the fiery rage and the liquid pain that flows like blood from the wounds on his soul. He profanes centuries of agonizing experience and shifts aside recollection of death and destruction beyond reckoning.

And for her sake - _for their sake -_ he makes himself think.

And though Clara is not Rose, he is still the Doctor, and when he looks down at her, it is the same look in his eyes that Rose saw.

"…it became good. That means a good Dalek is possible. That's what we learned today. Am I right, teach?"

"Top of the class!"

Pride mingles in her eyes with the fear that is no longer of him, and for that instant, he shoots from the bottom of the rubbish heap to the peak of the highest mountain, washed clean again by her faith, as he was once purified by the compassion of another.

Clara is not Rose, but he's been here before, alright. He wonders how he ever got so lucky.

* * *

 _ **6.**_

Clara is not Rose.

But he needs her now, as he needed her then.

 _"_ _YOU WOULD MAKE A GOOD DALEK."_

Those words have always made his hearts wither and curl inward like the legs of a dying spider.

Then. And now.

And he is wrong, he realizes, as Rusty speaks its high, damning praise.

"YOU ARE A GOOD DALEK."

No, the truth is, he needs her now more than ever.

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 **Reviews get you good karma. All the partying you've been doing over the holidays? Let's be honest, you need it. So do yourself a favor and review!**


	4. To Give Her the Moon

**Disclaimer: You know the drill, don't make me say it!**

* * *

 **To Give Her the Moon**

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" _What do you want? You want the moon? Just say the word and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down. Hey. That's a pretty good idea. I'll_ _give you the moon…"_

 _-George Bailey, 'It's a Wonderful Life'_

[The Eighth Doctor was a fan.]

* * *

 _ **1.**_

He couldn't stand Rose's boyfriend in the beginning either.

 _"_ _Is that Ricky? Don't talk, just shut up. How stupid are you?"_

But _this_ is untenable.

"He's a PE teacher! You wouldn't go out with a PE teacher! It's a mistake! You've made a boyfriend error!"

Clara – _my Clara_ – no, no, just Clara – should know better.

 _"_ _It's Mickey!"_

"I am not a PE teacher, I'm a maths teacher!"

His teeth grind together so hard when his mouth is shut that it has become painful to stop talking.

 _"_ _Mickey the Idiot, I might just choke!"_

"He's a soldier! Why would you go out with a soldier? Why not just get a dog or a big plant or…"

"Because I love him!"

It is like a being doused in liquid nitrogen. He goes cold down to his bones, like his blood has turned to ice, and freezes, his mouth snapping shut, as the cold settles into a sickening knot of something very like dread in the center of his body. The sudden silence is deafening.

"Why would you say that?" He can hear the minute tremor in his voice, magnified to a humiliating degree in the dead quiet of the auditorium. "Is this part of the surprise play?"

The joke falls flat.

He and Mickey had eventually learned to get along. Sort of.

But Soldier Boy here is not Mickey. The Doctor doesn't abide soldiers, doesn't trust them, actively dislikes them as a fact, and doesn't care how that intractability reflects on him. A soldier… He is frustrated and disheartened. Clara deserves better.

Try as he might, he cannot quite make himself believe that that is the source of this aching disappointment. Nor can he quite convince himself that it is PE's past as a soldier that he finds unforgivable.

* * *

 _ **2.**_

" _Nothing to do with me. It's not an invasion. So maybe this is it. First contact. The day mankind officially comes into contact with an alien race."_

Rose smiled when he said it, dawning wonder playful in her eyes.

But Clara is not Rose.

"Whatever future humanity might have depends upon the choice that is made right here and right now."

Clara is not smiling. She is bristling.

" _I'm not interfering because you've got to handle this on your own."_

"I can't make this decision for you."

Clara is not Rose, and Clara is not smiling at his faith in her, she is glaring at his intractable refusal to influence human history. He shouldn't let her irritation antagonize him. She is stressed and afraid right now, and remarkable as she is, she still just a young human. He shouldn't let it hurt.

But it does. It makes him feel… common. Used. Taken for granted. What must she see when she looks at him, but a tool, a cure-all that she keeps in her back pocket. Has she the right to take that tone with him the moment he fails to make all her problems vanish?

Perhaps she has. Perhaps he has given her that right, and that scares him.

* * *

 **3.**

" _That's when the human race finally grows up."_

Rose had smiled, color high in her cheeks. She made him promise not to run off on her. He did anyway. Afterwards, she forgave him.

"It's time to take the stabilizers off your bike!"

Clara is furious, color high in her cheeks. She shouts at him not to run off on her. He does anyway. Afterwards, she will forgive him.

Sometimes, he still seems to forget – Clara is not Rose.

* * *

 **4**.

"I had faith that you would always make the right choice."

It is the highest praise he knows how to give. Single-handedly saving humanity from itself while teetering on the back of a hatching planetoid-sized egg with a nuclear bomb ticking under her feet; impossible as it seems, Clara is even more remarkable than he thought. His Impossible Girl.

But Clara is crying. It gives him pause. He is almost distracted by the amazement of how deeply it cuts him to see her tears.

" _Five foot one and crying… never stood a chance…"_

"Why did you do it?" she accuses.

And he can't answer that. Of course he can't. He waffles at her with non-answers and inanity, because he can't answer.

But isn't it obvious? Isn't it?

Clara doesn't appear to have seen the obvious.

"It was cheap, it was pathetic. No, no, no. It was patronizing!"

Her tears are confusing him and her both.

"No! It was me allowing you to make a choice about your own future," he tries to explain, but it hurts that he should have to.

" _You've got to handle this on your own, Rose. That's when the human race finally grows up."_

"That was me respecting you."

" _You don't need me. Go celebrate history!"_

Rose had gone, with a smile.

But Rose was not who Clara is. Clara has told him to go away, a long way away, in his lonely bloody TARDIS, and it takes him a while to remember, through the pain of her rejection, what he had momentarily forgotten.

Clara is not Rose.

* * *

 **5.**

" _What sort of date are you?"_

Rose was young. A girl that goes out for chips. Still half a child. Still accustomed to being spoken to as such.

When Clara goes out, it is for coffee, not chips. Not a girl, a woman, and she is accustomed to being spoken to as such.

Clara was a girl once. When he met her, his Impossible Girl. Now the girl is gone, and when he looks at her, a woman stands in her place, and he wonders, almost frantically, where he has mislaid all of the time that seems to be slipping through his fingers like sand.

* * *

 **6.**

Very well, alright, so Clara is not Rose! But it can hardly be said that all the fault lies with him! After all, if she is such an adult, why is she acting like a petulant child?

Even so, he continues in faith. She will always make the right choice. She will see, surely she will see, once she has calmed down, why he did it.

Because it's obvious, isn't it?

To make the choice for her, to treat her like a child, is what would have been cheap, pathetic, patronizing.

It is what he might have done to Rose, now that he thinks about it. Because Rose was still half a child.

And Clara is not Rose.

Soon, perhaps even tonight, she will calm down, and she will see. Just like when she first saw him, like a light switch flicking from off to on, she will see this. She will look out of her window, and see the glowing weight of the moon hanging in the night sky, remember what she has done – what he gave her the space to do on her own - and surely she will see.

" _You stay there!" Rose ordered him, tripping eagerly towards the door, wonder in her eyes. "You've done this before."_

Surely she will see that he did it for her.

" _This is mine!"_

That he did it to give her the moon.

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 **You know what? I _don't_ want you to review. That's right, I forbid it! No matter what, I say you are not allowed to do it, you can't do it, and if you did it, you wouldn't be any good at it! Just take your comments and constructive critiques and shoo!  
**

 ** _Muwahahaha, the fools! They've played right into my hands! Now they will never be able to resist leaving a review just to spite me! Reverse psychology works every time!_ **

**Huh...? What do you mean, typing in italics is the equivalent of a stage whisper, and you can still read everything I am writing...?  
**

 **...drat. Foiled again.**


	5. Mathematics and Grief

**Disclaimer: You know what, I definitely _do_ own Doctor Who, as well as the Grand Canyon, the Eiffel Tower and a significant portion of the Great Wall of China. Still in talks to acquire the rights to the Horse Head Nebula. And if you believe any of that, I've got some prime ocean-front property to sell you, located in sunny Death Valley, Nevada.**

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 **Mathematics and Grief**

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 **1.**

Question: Why are beaches for saying good bye?

He left the rest of the surviving passengers of the Orient Express in the city, dazed, befuddled, barely conscious but somehow still functioning – business as usual for the human race. But he has brought her out here to the water, beyond the noise and press of the pudding brains and their incessant, irritating, mercifully distracting interrogations.

Why?

Might it be the scale of it? An attempt to dwarf the sheer enormity of this burgeoning sense of loss by comparison?

Perhaps it is the horizon, the great vast ocean itself dwindling to nothing within that distant perceptual infinity, beyond which lies more than he can see. Perhaps to remind him that there is, surprisingly, always hope?

Could it be the motion, the waves coming and going and coming and going, endlessly until they begin to blur together and lose their distinction? While he stands forever still and watches them rise, crest, crash and dissipate, one after another after another, back into featureless foam?

Hell, it may even be metaphorical: plenty of fish in the sea!

Or, on second thought, not.

* * *

 **2.**

Whatever subconscious urge goads him to engage in this act of masochism, he has brought the TARDIS out here onto the rocks and sand at the edge of perceptual infinity.

He has braved the incendiary intensity of her nearness in order to carry the slight, sleeping form of Clara – _my Clara_ – out onto the strand, the weight of her reality belied by her lightness, and the way she seems to fit with such mocking rightness in his arms.

He has, with a reserve of strength he had not previously been aware he possessed, relinquished her nearness to the frigid ground, tucking a blanket around her with tender care in full view of the mayfly waves and the ponderous bulk of ocean water and valediction.

The stage is set. When she wakes she will walk away from him. So he lets her sleep.

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 **3.**

He spots a stick of driftwood, liberates it from between a rock and a hard place where it has become lodged in a fit of kindred commiseration. Unsure what to do now that he's assumed a measure of responsibility for its ultimate fate, he judiciously decides to put it to work and idly starts scratching equations into the sand. The serene puzzle of higher mathematics goes a long way towards calming the turbulent tidal swells of emotion sucking at his hearts. Even still they threaten to drag him under and drown him in that crushing darkness of loss that lies beyond even the reach of starlight.

He knows he's being maudlin. He can tell. He grunts in annoyance and wonders, mostly to distract himself, if he still has that old electric guitar lying around somewhere, the one that Slash gave him that wild night just before the band broke up. Music is nothing but audible mathematics and grief. He's taken a sudden keen interest in both.

Maybe that is who he will be next. Maybe that's who he will be when Clara steps forever from his life.

 _Rock on, dudes._

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 **4.**

He pauses, stick stalling amidst the shifting grains, to flick a severe glance upwards. Past the horizon, towards the clouds, through condensing water vapor and the atmospheric shell, past orbiting satellites and asteroid belts and neighboring worlds. Beyond to where lies that infinitely deeper infinity between the stars, the one that he understands with far greater intimacy than that of the ocean. Or of this feeling. _That_ he doubts he will ever truly understand. No matter how many times it blindsides him.

 _"I'm never gonna leave you…" Rose declared, daring him to defy her._

Clara's malfunction is catching, he discovers, as he catches himself smiling through a profound surge of sadness.

Clara is not Rose. Sometimes he still seems to forget.

So. Question: Why has he brought Clara to a beach to say goodbye?

Answer: Maybe a bad wolf made him do it.

 _"I am the bad wolf. I create myself."_

Yes, maybe that's it. Maybe beaches aren't _actually_ for saying goodbye.

 _"It translates to Bad Wolf Bay."_

Maybe they are here on the sand beside the great water for no better reason than that, right at the beginning, he asked Clara if she wanted chips with her coffee.

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 **5.**

Clara is not Rose. More and more he knows this. Because she'd only wanted coffee. But he remains the Doctor. And he, consummate time traveler, had, in spite of everything, still managed to deliver it three weeks late.

Maybe that, more than anything else, is why they are on a beach, saying goodbye.

 _"I am the bad wolf. I create myself."_

Regret has a bitter, metallic taste. Clara is just beginning to stir. He goes back to scratching maths into the sand.

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 **The great and powerful Oz commands you to leave a review! And bring me the broomstick of the Wicked Witch while you're at it! Pay no attention to the fanfic author with the crazy eyes and the drunken monkey on her shoulder behind the curtain! Don't make me throw a fireball at you!  
**


	6. Forget About It!

**Disclaimer: Bananas! (If you haven't gotten the gist of this by now, you're too slow for it to matter).**

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 **Forget About It!**

* * *

 **1.**

Clara is mumbling into her mobile, proffering PE a hushed 'mission accomplished'. She darts delicately up the stairs, adding physical distance to the chasm she has already installed between them. Solider-Boy has won the battle and the war, all in one go. Efficient. Was there ever any doubt? That's what soldiers are for.

Vindication of his convictions – _officer indeed!_ – is an acrid balm to the widening wound inside, and he wishes Clara would come down and slap him for being a tiny bit pleased.

There is nothing pleasing about this. Nothing at all.

* * *

 **2.**

He will not look up at her. He will not give chase this time, as he did that first day, when she chose coffee over chips.

It is not pride.

 _"I made my choice a long time ago…" Rose declared._

It is self-preservation.

 _"… and I'm never gonna leave you."_

Clara is not Rose.

Well, no, indeed not! It took the full weight of two universes and the wrenching grasp of an interdimensional facsimile of Hell itself to tear Rose from his side. He remembers watching in unblinking horror as she was pulled into the light, unable and unwilling to look away, unable to sacrifice even a millisecond of the sight of her, even if it meant watching her die. He had looked into her eyes until to the very last, unflinching even as she vanished in he father's arms, miraculously safe, but lost forever.

He couldn't look away then. And he doesn't want to look away now. He wants to drink in every remaining drop of the sight of the woman in front of him, before the well of her presence runs forever dry.

But Clara is not Rose, and he knows it now more than ever. Clara has made her choice. And since Clara is not Rose, he won't watch her go. He won't accord her the privilege, and she can pass out of his life unheeded, and he won't ever, ever look…

The bitterness limning these thoughts is a petty and sullen overindulgence, and he feels instantly sullied by them. Guilty, as though he has stained both women by their shared residence in his regard.

* * *

 **3.**

He listlessly punches the coordinates into the console. Clara is still making placating noises into her mobile receiver. He could listen if he chose, but he doesn't want to hear the comforting domestic intimacies she's surely exchanging with her soldier.

 _"_ _I…" Rose was crying so hard she could barely speak. "I love you."_

Rose is gone, a thousand years gone.

Clara is not Rose.

The Doctor knows this.

Like a dagger piercing the soft, defensive hum of the engines, Clara's voice reaches him from far away.

"I love you."

And he almost looks up.

He can almost imagine that if he does so, he will find her looking back, gazing down with wide, innocently knowing, startled eyes, those words still on her lips. Just as Rose had gazed up with desperate tears in hers as she spoke them.

But it is different. He knows that it is different. He doesn't want to know it, doesn't want to believe it. But he knows – what ought to be, what must be - and he will not look up and give lie to wistful moment of forlorn hope. It will be gone soon enough, and so will Clara. Why rush things?

* * *

 **4.**

" _I… I love you…"_

He never got to say those words to Rose, no matter how much he may have longed to.

He will not say them to Clara, no matter…

Yes. It is different. They are different. No matter how much he remains the same.

* * *

 **5.**

He thinks he is ready.

She will go, and leave him, and he will lose her like losing a limb, and he will be alone, and he is foolishly convinced, in the vein of the most daisy-headed, doe-eyed, hopelessly, unforgivably naive of fresh-faced innocents, that he is in any way prepared to face it.

So it borders on cruelty when she bounds down the stairs, eyes sparkling with a flicker of mad daring that shines through a renewed light of wonder -

"Oh, to hell with the last hurrah! Let's keep going!"

\- and he discovers that he was never ready to let her go, not in the slightest, and never will be.

And how very like a woman, to go and change her mind - _her heart_ \- at the very last minute. What was all that agonizing for anyway? The relief hurts almost as much as the loss. Almost.

"Forget about it!"

" _I'm never gonna leave you."_

"Now shut up and give me some planets!"

" _Do you smell chips? I want chips…"_

He can't decide whether to laugh or cry, so he does neither. It is infectious, this surreal, almost feverish gleam of daring zinging between them, and she is here, still here, still real, staying here, and so he starts to ramble on about shrubbery in order to thwart a sudden mad urge to pull her into a hug, just like he used to. Can't have that. If he violates that sacred taboo, what will be left to stop him from pulling her closer, from kissing her skin, her mouth, breathing her in, winding himself in the silk of her and catching fire, kindling all of time and space ablaze and burning everything so that nothing can ever take her from him again?

Wouldn't that be a shame, just when, against all sane hope, he's got her back? Probably singe the shrubs as well.

 _Good men don't need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many._ Oh, but it's a near thing...

* * *

 **6.**

"Are you sure about this?" he asks her, breathless and trying not to show it. He is almost dizzy with his relief, drunk with it, and with that ancient old brand new fear. He wonders how much the weight of what he just asked shows on his face.

"Are you?" she asks, just as breathless. "Have you ever been?"

 _Yes._

"No."

"Then what are you waiting for?"

* * *

 **.**

 **.**

 **.**

 **Watch the swinging pendulum... You're getting sleepy... Your eyes lids are getting heavy... When I count to three, clap my hands, spin around in a circle and/or flick you on the nose, you will wake up and leave a review...**

 **Huh. Well, it worked for the Doctor...**


	7. Epilogue - Run

**Disclaimer: I wish Doctor Who were mine, but if wishes were time pods, then beggars would be millionaire kings in 16th century Vienna...**

* * *

 **Epilogue - Run**

 **0.  
**

It is only delaying the inevitable. The Doctor knows this. Clara is not Rose, and it is different this time.

But in the end, it is always the same. Clara's choice will not avail her any more than Rose's did.

 _"I'm never gonna leave you..."_

In the end, he will lose her just the same.

The Doctor knows this. He can't help knowing it – he's tried.

But for now – oh, for now, for _right now_ \- she is here, still here, still real, staying here, still by his side.

 _"...and do you know what? I wouldn't have missed it for the world!"_

Its vanity, the Doctor surmises, to think he can feel Rose smiling at him from the other end of eternity as he watches Clara pull the lever with wonder in her eyes. That working-class accent, lit sweetly from beneath with laughter and urgency, echos down to him, and he and Clara chase it into the vortex.

 _"Run...!"_

Clara is not Rose. But he is still, inescapably, himself. And because he loved Rose – because he lost Rose – he will hold on to Clara and they will outrun the ending. For as long as time allows.

 _Watch us run…_

* * *

 ** _._**

 ** _._**

 ** _._**

 ** _Fin_**

 **There are so many more comparisons to be drawn between Rose and Clara, but I feel this is a good place to stop. If a suitable story arc comes to me in the future, I may go on, we'll just have to wait and see. Until then, thank you for reading, thank you for your lovely reviews (which you may feel free to leave after the beep), and thanks for all the fish!  
**


End file.
